I'm about as far removed from the MRA Redpill GamerGate world as you can get, and even I seriously don't get NolanT's response to "Save or Dice". I mean, really? "We don't need another five white guys"? That is not how diversity works. It's not about excluding white men. It's about taking time to consider whether or not you've made an effort to include people who aren't white men. If your reasoning was that you only had enough promotional resources to focus on one or two sponsorships of this nature and you wanted to save it for a more diverse group of players, that's your call to make, but if that's your call, you respond by saying "We appreciate the request and while we're excited to see your project, we respectfully decline the opportunity to sponsor." Not by saying "We don't need another five white guys." The DawnforgedCast guys seem like good people. Nothing they have said or done has ever come off as sexist or exclusionary. It feels like NolanT took one look at the cast composition and just made all kinds of assumptions about the character of the players and the show without actually looking into it, and then rudely dismissed it like it was a group of frat boys wanting to make a D&D show about ale and whores. For a man who said just a few days ago that "We're passionate about the program; we just aren't jerks about it," you have clearly been behaving like a massive jerk, and I suspect that these two instances are just the tip of the iceberg. During the Reddit thing, all I wanted was to see Roll20 leave the subreddit to the fans. I'm very much glad they chose to do that. But now? Now NolanT has some serious explaining to do. Clearly, that was not his first PR disaster. Clearly, he needs to be as far removed from facing the public as possible, and he needs to apologize, sincerely and profusely, for being a jerk, as well as for giving a blatantly racist and sexist reason for denying the sponsorship of a reputable group of professional nerds. And yes, this reaches the bar of "racism" and "sexism" for me. This was a person in a position of power systematically denying privilege based solely on a philosophy that people of a specific race and sex are inherently unsuitable for that privilege, or at the very least, inherently less deserving than people of a different race or sex. He gave no reason other than race and sex in denying the sponsorship. That's pretty much cut-and-dry, and I'm not the kind of guy that goes around bleating about "white genocide". I hate those guys. But yeah. This is where the line is and NolanT definitely crossed it. He either needs to give an apology good enough for the community to accept, or he needs to step down from his position at Roll20. He only seems capable of burning bridges, not building them. And as I said during the previous debacle, it's not so much that I'm threatening to take my business elsewhere if he doesn't. I have a campaign that I've put a great deal of work into on this platform and I intend to see it through. But once that's done, if nobody else is willing to use this platform with me for my next campaign, then I'll have no choice but to end my subscription, because I can't afford to spend money on a service I'm not using. Not a threat, just reality. I want to keep using Roll20, but if my friends say they'd rather use Fantasy Grounds because it's not co-founded by a complete jerk, I won't really have much to say to convince them otherwise, because NolanT's behavior has been very much indefensible. He either needs to salvage his image immediately with an unequivocal and sincere apology where he admits he acted flippantly, jumped to incorrect conclusions about the character of the people he interacted with, and behaved very inappropriately as a result, or simply sever his ties to this service entirely so he doesn't take it down with him. It's the only way I see Roll20 surviving this, and that's really all I care about at this point. I just don't want everybody's hard work be undone because of one person's inability to keep his foot out of his mouth. NolanT, if you're reading this, know that I don't necessarily think you're a bad person, but you are unarguably bad at interacting with people, and you are actively hurting something you presumably built. You are actively hurting the other people who helped you build it. You don't just owe it to your customers to make things right, you owe it to your own company to make things right, because there's a lot more viable competition out there than there was five years ago, and it's a lot easier for people to switch today than it used to be. You have to fight to keep people's business. You can't just presume consumer loyalty. It has to be earned. Apologize. Reach deep inside yourself and give the best damn apology of your life and hope beyond hope that it's good enough for you to keep your job without Roll20 suffering more as a result. And if it isn't good enough, just step aside. It'll only get worse if you don't. EDIT: And just for the sake of clarity since some people have questioned the credibility of DawnforgedCast, Cody from Taking20 and Jim Davis of WebDM corroborate the claim, and it seems consistent with the behavior we've seen of NolanT.
